


If I was Brave

by Coldest_Fire



Category: The Book of Mormon - Parker/Stone/Lopez
Genre: Happy Ending, I gave Connor a break compared to my other works, Implied/Referenced Sex, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Overcoming Internalized Homophobia, gay pining told in texts, getting left on read for a whole school year sucks, just once I wanted Kevin to be the one pleading, other than that this work is remarkably not painful, theres a reference to Kevin being concerned about HIV after the BFN incident, theres a reference to cutting scars but they're heavily former
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-27 23:31:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20768762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coldest_Fire/pseuds/Coldest_Fire
Summary: “Can I please just not be completely isolated on NYE?”(Read January 1, 5:43 AM)These buzzed against Kevin’s thigh as he lay awake, phone still in his pocket listening to the countdown on a radio station. Listening to a friend who worked from campus radio narrate a short poem she’d written abut newness. She talked about dreams, about how the new is a stand-in for what we were never, but have always yearned to be, It isn’t new—we’ve had it in us so long, and we’re letting it be free. Or maybe we’re reigning it in to let the rest of us out.Its not changing but it’s becoming.Three and a half hours of apologies later, he discarded any hope he’d ever send the text.





	If I was Brave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GemmaNye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GemmaNye/gifts).

> I want to start off by giving credit. The ingenious idea of framing a chapter in quotations from texts gone unanswered was from What A Beautiful Wedding by GemmaNye. Please all go read and scream about that, because it’s a quality fic and you will feel feelings you can’t turn off! (I did and that’s why this is here)
> 
> I wrote this in its entirety between 11 and 2:10 AM and then edited it over the past couple weeks because. I'm a hot mess disaster woman. Originally it ended ver differently, but I decided to end it this way because I didn't want Kevin to "protagonist" his way out, and somehow be the hero and win it all back in one huge gesture, and I didn't want Connor to be some damsel for him to save (as I'm admittedly prone to doing in my other fics/in the Rp I used to dabble in.)

_Read at 3:32 am._

It glowed on his screen. They always switched to read eventually. He had to wonder if apple was doing this to mess with his head, or if Kevin’s cell service was weird, and his replies were lost in cyberspace.

What was more likely was that Kevin was, in fact, back to being the ideal mormon. To Kevin, their night of _love_ was something to sanitize out of his narrative, or repent for. He was a vice. So he’d find somewhere, someone who didn’t think his love was a blasphemy.

So why was he so hung up on the way Kevin’s arms felt holding him on his chest?

_______

_“Hey, can we talk?”_

_Read September 7th, 12:12 p_m

What did McKinley expect of him? It arrived a week after returning to Salt Lake City, while he sat with his mother in a doctor’s office, waiting for about the thousandth test result to come in. It was the elephant in the room at family dinners, what had happened to him the time his parents got a _wonderful_ phone call about the prices of surgery and pain meds in Uganda. Everyone was wary of him, like potential-HIV was some kind of insect perched on his shoulders that would fly off and latch onto his family if they got too close. They didn’t trust the African labs that said he was fine, of course. His mom’s eyes crinkled too much. There was tension in them not from her forced smiles. His dad’s smile was wooden. The rest of his face stayed flat, like bad Botox. They wanted to know if their boy had _it._

The verdict made him able to breathe again. Their paranoia had rubbed off on him. He didn’t know how he’d tell Connor that he had to go get tested if he was positive. Or how they’d tell Connor’s family. Hi, yes I know you tried to pray, beat and eventually institutionalize the gay out of your son, but I undid all that in an evening and now he’s very sick. _Please don’t hurt him._

If it came to that, volunteering in the hospital. Proselytizing. Someone coughed blood. Didn’t that happen on House once? The lady doctor got coughed on by that gay guy that time. Maybe Connor could say that.

_“it’s about the last night. Kevin, Please?”_

_Read September 7th, 12:18 pm_

His eyes shut a moment. Seeing it in type made real what had seemed like a particularly vivid dream. Connor knew better than he did that there was no future for them here. Or in Uganda, where it was illegal. Their legacy was a saga of stolen kisses, and lingering touches, and nights where Connor’s Mission Leader Sacred Duties meant staying up because Kevin was having a flashback. Or was in pain, Or wasn’t able to sleep, and he’d just lay so close to him, and whisper to him. One beautiful night. It was ephemeral. Better off as a dream. Something to guiltily consider when alone in the dark and spilling tears or other fluids—was it better to miss it or just to fantasize?

He’d kissed him like the last bastion of salvation and Kevin, who’d lost the pride he’d arrived with managed to find what he set out for in the first place. He managed to feel incredible. His relationship to his body had, understandably, been weird, and a little fraught, and Connor treated it like something to treasure—not what he’d have expected from an apparently sinful act. Expecting it to be weird, or wrong, or too much. Expecting to need to stop, he found none of the shame he’d expected. All he felt was Connor—it didn’t simplify into neat little words, but if he had to try, he felt cherished. He could still remember the way Connor had breathlessly asked him if he could, so many times. Trying to remember how to speak to say yes, everything a haze.

And Connor had done everything he could, jut because he wanted to. He’d let Kevin decide if he wanted to reciprocate. Connor’s delicate hands showed him how, and breathless “like that” and “oh, Kevin that’s so good.” He’d needed the reassurance that he wasn’t hurting him, hadn’t expected it also to be _good_. He knew the way he gasped, the way his body shuddered, the way his hips arched. He knew that McKinley liked to say his name, and liked to hear his own—it made it feel less transgressive.

Less like an anonymous fuck, even though the effect was the same. Connor could never see him again.

His mother hugged him after reading the results. No diagnosis meant he was Kevin, but 2 years older and with a bit of a weird shirt tan. It meant no one had to address that he’d changed. Maybe that was easier.

Somewhere he’d read that the light people saw from stars was emitted centuries ago, and that the stars could die and we’d keep seeing them, like they were there. He wasn’t dead, but he was different, invisibly beyond the halo he’d emitted two years ago.

_“Arnold told me the good news, Kev. I’m glad you’re alright. Celebratory coffee on me?”_

_Read September 10th, 8:04 am_

Why was Arnold talking about it?

Kevin only told him because he wanted to vent. His family wouldn’t have quarantined him if he had,_ I don’t know, malaria? That spread through blood too, right?_ But this had a stigma. His parents still remembered it as the disease that comes from gay sex. He was venting to Arnold that what happened to him wasn’t his fault. They were treating him like he asked for it—like they’d treat him if they knew about the last night, he realized.

His people died over that shit. Because people turned an epidemic into the intolerant hill they’d let others die on. It didn’t disconcert him that somehow, he felt more aligned with gay people than with his own religion. But he didn’t tell it to Arnold like that, he made it sound like he was just annoyed by the quarantining, and everyone’s refusal to just talk about it.

Arnold didn’t know about the last night. Telling Connor would be like telling any other friend. He texted Arnold to ask him to please have some discretion, and got an apology, which he accepted. Connor deserved to know he was safe, and it wasn’t a conversation Kevin was ready for. This was better.

He couldn’t be the guy who got coffee, which would invariably mean talking, like they used to for hours. Meant illicit hands entwines under the table, and remembering how soft Connor’s fingertips were. Maybe stealing kisses like they had for their final few months in district 9. It was a gateway drug.

He didn’t respond. Mormons couldn’t have coffee, no matter what he did in Uganda. Coffee and Connor weren’t things he could ever again taste, and that was _fine._

_“How’s fall treating you? Back to school I’m guessing! Hope your semester isn’t to busy, haha. We should meet up at orientation. Or after class.”_

_Read September 20, 4:13 pm_

Connor’s name looked wrong on the screen of his phone. It didn’t even come up as Connor. Elder McKinley felt disingenuous somehow. H was pretty sure he didn’t get to call Connor by his last name after he’d seen him naked. If seeing it was wrong, opening it was worse. Tit was a message sent to a different person, a person he didn’t get to be anymore.

HE felt worse opening it and seeing it was something so normal. Had he expected a description of their nights together? A declaration of love? Connor was over him by now, he had to be. He was either living in the closets, or crushing that infamous box of thoughts, which their time together had already been discarded into.

He couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d wanted it to be. Something irrefutable, something he couldn’t hide from. If Connor told him he loved him, would it have changed anything?

He considered blocking the number. Maybe then he’d stop wanting it to be something it wasn’t. He’d typed half of it in on his block list before backspacing. What if McKinley got in trouble and needed him? His parents were intolerant, and it could happen. Kevin wouldn’t block him, just so he could know he was okay.

His interest was purely in protecting him, and not in waiting to see if Connor would ever give him something he couldn’t hide from. 

_“I thinghk im drunk :)”_

_“Do u read these?”_

_“Sometimes it htink about how careful u were w me and I did t think it woulud ever be like that????”_

_Read October 15, 10:03 pm_

Drinking wasn’t allowed. Of course, neither was coffee, or sweat drenched, gentle, intense…moments in the dark in Uganda. Connor knew the rules better than even he did, because Kevin had never run afoul of them (barring the time he stole that doughnut, but he’d atoned for that enough.)

Tellingly, he’d never atoned for what they did together. It didn’t feel like sinning. It hadn’t surprised him that Connor hadn’t expected whatever that became, but it did hurt like it was pushing his ribs out of his body. Kevinhad been a minefield, and one Connor navigated elegantly, and with a lot of asking, a lot of talk. Somehow, when it was Connor’s body, he’d expected the rules to change. He hadn’t expected even a fraction of that care.

Kevin blamed whoever told Connor that it was wrong in the first place. Whoever told him what they did with their bodies wasn’t love. Connor had been so desperate, had told Kevin to do whatever he wanted to him. Maybe he hadn’t thought Kevin would want him if he didn’t do everything Kevin could think of to want. So Kevin did exactly what Connor had done for him, even if Connor always said yes.

Asking breathily, “do you want me to...” and not knowing the words that came after, but Kevin tried to imply it with what few words he could muster, and gentle touches.

“Do you want me to touch?” And a hand up his thigh, light as air.

“Do you want me to...” and fingers running over the curve of his butt, which was so soft he could scarcely believe what he was touching.

“Do you want more?” Hissed into his ear, as Connor kissed his neck to keep himself silent.

“Does it feel better like this?” And a hair deeper. Faster. Whatever made his breath hitch as he assured him it did.

“Do you want... me?” Restating Connor’s own. He could hardly believe Connor wanted him like that.

“How does it feel?” A gasp, not real words. Connor replied in a kiss. He was understood.

_“ig it was tender?”_

_Read October 15, 10:10 pm_

Tender. Connor could have used any number of words. There were words that described what it felt like inside him. There were words for the bruises under Kevin’s collar on the plane the next day, and words for the things he sometimes remembered, and even more rarely let himself dwell on. The carnal, the bodily and the profane. Connor could have made it about the physicality, and his dick.

Naturally, that wasn’t what stuck with him after a night like that. Tender was gasps and whispered names. Lingering touches and gentle movements. Tender was both of them asking so many times for permissions the other implied with their body, because it wasn’t about bodies, really. It was about whether were, what they felt. Tender didn’t turn him on like a graphic sext might have. It ached somewhere his hands couldn’t reach. Tender ached like all the words Kevin had never let himself use.

He tapped the bar to compose a message, staring at the keyboard until the letters became alien, all points and curves, symbols that couldn’t compose his reality. He’d been starving for that tenderness. For McKinley’s hugs that lingered in his lungs, even after they’d parted, because it helped him breathe. Casual intimacy, like hands on his arm, or straightening his tie, or lying beside him on the bad nights. He hadn’t realized how isolating it was to go without.

_“I miss it.”_

Those weren’t real words. Those were things his mom said about the cheese in Paris, or his brother said about the space centre they saw the same time as he went to Disney. I miss it was like high school, where he was easily valedictorian. Meaningless, empty words, composed in symbols, that didn’t make up even an intimation of this ache.

The text bubble popped up after half an hour of typing and retyping on his end, and he realized how unfair this was. If Connor saw he was here, this would never get easier for either of them.

He backspaced a final time. All that could do was get them both again addicted.

_“We’re u realllly there?”_

_“Kevin?”_

_“Was that’s toomuch?”_

_“Do yo miss me to?”_

_Read October 15 at 11:38 pm_

He had a sudden and debilitating awareness of how cold this bed was. How empty a queen size was with only one man in it. It would have been so easy to text Connor that he missed him. He couldn’t endanger him.

What happened to Kevin was less the worry, because by now, he wasn’t an idiot. He knew the feelings weren’t going anywhere. That he was _gay._ That even if he wasn’t acting on that, he was never going to bring his mother the seven grandkids she wanted out of him. Maybe Connor wasn’t as far gone.

Maybe if Kevin pretended really hard, he could convince himself he wasn’t either, that it was late and he was being dramatic. That he could teach himself to be _normal_. He turned his phone on silent. Pretended what he had was the other kind of ache these thoughts could create. Pretended it was sex and not intimacy he needed. Coming down from his own touch, the bed was cold. It was all his fingers.

He felt more alone.

He rolled over, and bit his lip, and tried to sleep. Closed eyes couldn’t shed tears. Not until it wracked his body.

But damn, could he pretend it wasn’t happening.

_“I thk I loved you, kev.”_

_“I don’t kow if it meant thag to you but there it is”_

_“u taught me I coul want that.”_

_Sunday, october 16, 11:56 am_

_“I’m so sorry for everything I said to you last night. It’s amoral of me, and I know it can’t happen again. I can’t expect your friendship of you if I’m going to try to tempt you. I’m sorry. I’m going to get help. I won’t do that again. Please forgive me.”_

_Read October 20 at 6:02 am_

He didn’t know which was responsible for his tie asphyxiating him: the night or the morning texts. He supposed cause of strangulation didn’t matter to the victim.

There were words he didn’t use, not because he didn’t think that was what it was, or because he didn’t think he had the right to use them. He didn’t use them because how could he go back to real life after those words? How could he expect himself to swallow his feeling when the names for them weren’t stuck in his throat.

He dropped his phone at the campus coffee shop, where his spearmint tea suddenly wasn’t potent enough when he opened the texts. He taught Connor that he could want that, just in time to remember why they couldn’t anymore. That was what the morning text was. It was why Kevin couldn’t dare fixate on the texts from that drunken night. Even if that wasn’t the first time he’d heard the words.

That night, Connor had thought he was sleeping. He was sated, limbs heavy, head light. His entire body felt like his lungs, ebbing and flowing with a tide of oxygen, Connor collapsed atop him. Their bodies slick with sweat. Kevin’s eyes open but Connor’s were shut. His eyelashes fluttered against Kevin’s chest. “Thank you,” he said first, in a whisper that was barely audible. “I love you,” after a beat of silence. Left one more kiss over the secret he’d spoken.

Kevin still knew what those words felt like whispered into his skin.

His voice got stuck in his throat. If Kevin could mean it, he wouldn’t tell. How cruel would it have been to hope? It wasn’t fair to ruin Connor’s life over intangible feelings that he wasn’t staking his own on.

Kevin’s lips itched to speak words no one would understand but him, but they had to stay lodged in his throat. They couldn’t leave, not with so much in the balance.

Besides, Connor was doing the same thing. He was swallowing it down, and apologizing for words they both knew were Truer than anything. He traded honesty for a kind of innate auto-correct, that took out everything he wasn’t allowed to mean.

It hurt, because if Kevin hadn’t hidden from his phone, maybe he wouldn’t have gotten these same, stiff, impersonal lines that sounded like the shit the kind of therapist who operates out of a church basement tells you. He wasn’t sure which of them was feeling more strangled, but he supposed one of them was at least brave enough to say it.

Connor couldn’t take another round of this. He’d seen the impacts of the last round. When morning rose, and he was getting dressed to pretend it hadn’t happened, when he touched him even the night before. It was hard to tell by feel and easy to see silvered marks on his thighs. They were old. Maybe that was the fastest way to stop thinking. Maybe he thought it was punishment, when he wasn’t straight.

Shit, Kevin didn’t know. But that week, when he was in psych, and their professor talked about _non-suicidal self injury_—as it related to some other topic, coping, he thought, he couldn’t stop wondering if Connor was doing it now.

He had the worst visual fo his face contorted with an ugly sob, and blood of his fingertips, and he knew it wasn’t reasonable or realistic.

If he told him he felt it, did that get better or worse? He couldn’t type it, but he typed ILY. Laughed at himself bitterly. God, he was pathetic. He wasn’t strong enough to do this.

_“So, I’m not allowed to see Chris now that he and James are out. I don’t think I’ve talked to a human being that thinks I’m human in six days. Kevin, I’m not asking you to go back to that, I know you aren’t like me.”_

_“Can I please just not be completely isolated on NYE?”_

_“New Years Res: Either learn to be who I want, or learn to be what they want. This in between isn’t a person worth being to any of us.”_

_Read January 1, 5:43 am_

These buzzed against Kevin’s thing as he lay awake, phone still in his pocket listening to the countdown on a radio station. Listening to a friend who worked from campus radio narrate a short poem she’d written abut newness. She talked about dreams, about how the new is a stand-in for what we were never, but have always yearned to be, It isn’t new—we’ve had it in us so long, and we’re letting it be free. Or maybe we’re reigning it in to let the rest of us out.

Its not changing but it’s becoming.

It was the closes’t thing Kevin had heard of a prayer he understood. A prayer to become all the things he almost was. He almost called Connor, but he wasn’t _new_. He hadn’t become the Kevin that could say those words. No other Kevin was worth fucking up his life that bad for.

You can’t give someone in rehab a hit just because it makes you feel better.

Sometime after 5, he woke unto the sound of one of his brothers getting up for his morning jog. His hands trembled like 12 cups of coffee injected directly into his veins. He texted Arnold to text one of the others. Neely, Zelders, Davis, Schrader, he didn’t really care who.

Chris found a way to talk to him. Said he was on a family trip. Seemed a little down, but all that family tome around the holidays did that. He was probably alright. Could Kevin please text him though? Kevin knew it was cowardly, Chris who he was banned from got through, but he couldn’t type a hello?

Arnold relayed it perfectly, sympathetically. He told Kevin it was “a-okay if he wasn’t okay with like, you know, loving men in a like marrying them kind of way, but it was super not-cool to ice out his friend when he needed him just because he had a different stance on that.” There was definitely a lord of the rings analogy that somehow looked back to when someone told Brigham Young’s one friend that he’d end up in Mordor if he kept making eyes at Legolas’ like totally luxurious mane of hair. It ended in Legolas letting him touch it because they were totally still friends even if the other guy was also super into Legolas’ arrow, and Legolas wasn’t into shooting it in him or anything.

There was more, but Kevin couldn’t focus. He wasn’t even brave enough tell his best friend that Legolas’ arrow was exactly where this problem started. He envies how easily Arnold said love when he made his analogy. He felt like that word would burn out his throat—it was too powerful, it wouldn’t be uttered.

Three and a half hours of apologies later, he discarded any hope he’d ever send the text.

_February 2, 7:36 am_

_“Update on the New Years Res: they win.”_

_“I don’t even know if I believe them when they keep telling me it’s wrong. I don’t want to? I don’t believe that it matters if they’re wrong anymore. Goodness knows I can’t move out, and they’re my family. They’re trying to love me even if it feels like they don’t love ME. So I guess it’s wrong, and I guess I’m straight now. Just so you know you don’t have to hide now.”_

_Read February 2, 3:47 pm_

He typed paragraphs picking their stance apart. An impassioned defence of gay romance from a psychological, sociological, philosophical standpoint. Hid behind elegant academic arguments. Hid behind denying it was wrong. Backspaced. Longer messages than his intro sociology term paper that he wrote on Queer Theory because if he called it academia and hid behind Judith Butler, he could pretend it wasn’t about trying to prove he could love. Dissertations on the meaning of love and how it was not a word exclusively for what the church sanctioned. It was an abstract. The meaning really was attributed… Love was abstract language, which of course mean’t his English prof would ask how we make it concrete. How do we make a word with no fixed definition into something provable?

By telling the truth.

“Connor, our night together scares the hell out of me because it was right. It felt good. You felt like you cared, and I tried to do that back. Your skin was soft and pliant and you said my name when you breathed, because you knew that made it feel less like it was supposed to be finite, and you were right. I breathed yours back because I felt each moment slipping and that scared me more than the idea that this was good. You told me how you felt and I’ve been wondering since you said it if things would be better or worse if I was brave enough to say it back.

I guess the fact that I can remember how the words felt isn’t a substitute for the courage to even type them.”

It sat, typed but unsent. It was all he had, but it wasn’t enough.

He wanted to believe that love wasn’t strict, and overly regulated like a campus anti-plagiarism statement. Only accepted in heterosexual APA format. Love was whispered words absorbed into his skin.

Hours of typing and deleting yielded nothing better. His speech bubble popping up and down. He wondered if Connor was watching it on the other side.

He couldn’t think of anything to say that was enough.

_May 1, 3:32 am_

_“Kevin, I’ve written this text a lot of times and I think I’m finally sending it. Kevin, that night was the best night of my life, and it’s made some of the worst, but it’s a part of me and I know that now. What I can’t seem to expect is that it’s a part of you, or that you’re even going to say something. I don’t know what I did to you to deserve you not speaking to me, unless it’s the obvious. Texting you, expecting replies, it’s not good for me, Kevin. Any passable counsellor (so, what I’m seeing on campus and not what my parents are sending me to) would tell me I’m addicted. I think I have to quit you.”_

_Read May 1, 3:32 am_

He’d set Connor’s vibrate tone to the most obnoxious one. Set him as an exception on do not disturb, with the loudest ringtone. He’d waited months. Sometimes, they’d be doing a reading in class, once one on personality, and he remembered how outgoing Connor was (high Extroversion, high conscientiousness, probably also high agreeability—the question was Openness and Neuroticism, and the weird sixth factor he was pretty sure his prof invented.), and he’d freeze because somehow, it came back to him. He’d check his texts. And then his email.

Never a reply.

He’d saved the text from last time in notes. It accosted him each time he went to change the list of his readings for class. Backspace Oscar Wilde readings, wonder if that Fin De Siècle author would shame him for it. Or would Oscar warn him that that boy had parents that made the Marquess of Queensbury look accepting.

He typed any number of pleas for a second chance he didn’t deserve. He’d let Connor put his heart out there, without so much as sending him a hello, an assurance it was really him on the other end.

There was nothing he could type that would ever be enough.

He had a _really_ bad idea.

Connor answered before the phone before the first ring, and Kevin forced himself to keep his voice to a whisper—he did have siblings who would complain, loudly, at breakfast.

“Connor, hi, I…I haven’t known how to talk to you. You know what it’s like—You know what could happen, I guess, better than I do. I’m scared. And I haven’t been able to forget it, and I don’t know if quitting me means you aren’t still thinking about it but-”

“Kevin,” he breathed, and somehow, it sounded just like that night, even if tinged with a different emotion.

“But god, Connor, I think about it. You said my name that night,” he whispered, almost desperate for Connor to fill in the blanks, and give him any kind of strength until it fizzled out.

There was a bit of a pause, and then Connor whispered, “Because I didn’t want it to feel like some hookup, right? You know what I was feeling,” he insisted, but he also didn’t use the word anymore. Kevin didn’t deserve that after this kind of silence.

Kevin added in “and I said yours cause I was scared, I guess,” he paused, taking a breath, “I kept feeling like the moment was going to be over, and like the moment was good, and everything after was going to be… different. If it had to be over, I wanted it to be real while it could and I thought that would be enough. You know, it would be over and then we could become the people we used to be. But I don’t think we ever were those people. And I should have said this on new years, because the emcee on the channel I listened to said change wasn’t really new, it was becoming. It was a process of becoming all the things were weren’t yet, and I wasn’t brave. And I’m not brave now, but—”

“But you’re here,” Connor filled in, sounding a little far away, “is that brave?”

“If I was brave,” Kevin took a long swallow, his throat feeling bigger, more hollow, and still somehow like he couldn’t push the words out of it. Another swallow. “If I was brave, I’d tell you I love you.”

Connor was silent a little while, just sort of absorbing that. Kevin didn’t speak, he couldn’t. There were no words in his language for any of what he felt in the silence of this moment.

“Then be brave, Kevin," Connor encouraged, in the same tone he used on the new recruits when they were nervous about life in Uganda. “because you’re a little harder to quit. Maybe, I might even love you too, if you could.” His tone was playful, his words sincere. “How about, in a few hours, we are up, we get dressed, and we get coffee on campus. You and I finally, and I think I’m going to need the caffeine, cause I’m not going to sleep, even if I tell you that’s what I’m doing.”

“I guess, in a few hours, I could be brave,” he whispered, before he rolled over to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. Please review, because I read the reviews to my lizards, and my panther chameleon definitely doesn't know what they mean, but he likes it anyway. 
> 
> Also, let me know if you want Connor's perspective on the whole ordeal or a continuation.I can't promise to write anything in a timely manner that isn't worth marks, Bit I'll def try to write it if theres interest.


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